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Dragon boats ply Pittsburgh waters : Source: Added Feature from City Paper's Health and Fitness Guide from 6/22/2006, Writer: Violet Law As workouts go, you don’t get anything as sweatless as paddling with the Pittsburgh Paddlefish. A light breeze cools your head as the league’s boat glides over the velvety green water of the Allegheny. Since you’re shielded by the leafy shade of Washington’s Landing and the riverbank, it’s hard to break a sweat. Which is not to say it’s not demanding exercise. But all the while you’re spurred on by the drumbeat — because what you’re paddling is no ordinary boat. The Paddlefish uses a dragon boat — a narrow, canoe-like craft invented in China more than 2,000 years ago. The 40-foot-long boat seats 20, and sports a brilliantly painted dragon’s head at the bow. There the drummer perches, coordinating the paddling with the rhythm of the drumsticks. The captain, too, commands the pace with her instructions. “Do 20 strokes easy at a two-minute pace,” bellows Laurie Butler, captain of the Millvale-based Paddlefish, a nearly all-female league that is affiliated with Three Rivers Rowing. “You really should be like you’re in a race — not all out, but close.” With that, the team propels the craft under the 40th Street Bridge and toward the Landing — for a beer at the Red Fin Blues restaurant. Make no mistake, Butler cautions: The paddlers practice hard all year long and enjoy an imbibing break only a few times a year. Indeed, as the summer race season has begun, the league has ratcheted up its drill. It now meets at the Millvale Boathouse three times a week: two weeknights and Saturday morning. “You’re part of the team,” says Butler, of Mount Lebanon. “You feel the camaraderie and the commitment to keep coming.” It might seem odd that an ancient Chinese sport popular in New York, Philadelphia and San Francisco — cities with large Asian-American populations — has taken root in Pittsburgh. It wasn’t easy. Team member Kit Ayars, of Greenfield, recalled a determined, if difficult, start a half-dozen years ago. That’s when boat-builders in Wuhan, China, a sister city of Pittsburgh, sent two boats across the Pacific to the North Shore in a gesture of cultural exchange. The boat’s maiden voyage took place on a set of concrete blocks, as founding members kept the vessel landlocked in order to practice their strokes before setting out on water. Members also received a crash course in the sport’s provenance in Chinese legends circa the fourth century B.C. But once the team gathered enough paddlers to launch the boat, it began making serious headway. The league routinely sees enough regulars to launch two craft at each practice, and in April, Pittsburgh Paddlefish even started a youth league. Ayars said she enjoys the serenity and sensuality of being on the water. “You’re seeing the river. You smell the river,” says Ayars. “You use all the senses.” To hear Butler tell it, you also use all your body. To paddle, you wield the muscles in the upper body and push your feet against the bottom of the boat in order to plow into the water. “You feel like you’re throwing your whole body forward,” says Butler. Although Butler says most people joined hoping to use recreational paddling as a way to stay fit, now all of them are gung-ho about racing. The team competed in early June in Parsipanny, N.J., and will participate in races in Toronto, Tampa, Fla., and New York’s Finger Lakes. As always, the season will culminate in the city’s Dragon Boat Festival, which is slated for Sept. 16 this year. Few of the members — most of whom hold sedentary, professional jobs and call themselves nerds — would have imagined themselves as competitive paddlers. But clutching the wooden paddle and thrusting it into the currents at the beat of the drum seems to have changed everything. “Once they got started,” says Butler, “they all became addicted.” Links * Interested in joining the Paddlefish, paddlesup@verizon.net.